I still remember Frontier: Elite 2 and playing it on my Atari ST 1040 (1 MB ram) and it's still one of the most exciting games ever. Personally since these games are so huge in scope where you can replace ships and upgrade them (even sell off your engines in Elite 2 or add more shield generators) the possibilities of that game was simply enormous. You choose your career like trader, bounty hunter, pirate or do missions for (if i remember correctly) the federation or the empire etc. You could take a mission to assassinate someone (probably not from the two organisations I mentioned), get the location of where he/she/they would be at a certain time, travel there and then wait for them to hyperspace out of the system and then with your hyperspace cloud analyzer "simply" by using that upgraded equipment and following them to the edge of some star system. Now I say "simply" since I never understood how to do it back then both with young age and no internet for guide info or bothering reading the manual (still have the game in my book case by the way). If you were to assassinate too close to planets and space stations you'd get the police after you and get a negative ranking - the highest ranking in one of three categories would be "Elite" hence the name of these games.

You really need to support this game if you liked the X-wing TIE fighter games - this seems to become one amazing space sim. They just added more higher tiers that lots of people seem to want and have upgraded to so there's still £20 tiers left today (full game) since a lot upgraded (over 80 free tiers at £20 as of me writing this). You can play the game both single and multiplayer and there are no recurring fees for multiplayer. You can even buy the game with all upcoming expansions included. Upcoming features will be things like walking around on planets, space stations and your own ship .

You really need to check out this kickstarter and all the info and videos. Personally I'm much more interested in this then Star Citizen.